Exploring university buildings from the inside is a useful and adventurous thing! You can find a lot of interesting yet unexpected places. For example, students’ guilds’ rooms. I think they are solely Finnish creation. I haven’t ever seen anything like this in other countries where I’ve been as a student.
Student guilds are some kind of student clubs formed by faculty. But the difference between a guild and a club is that guilds have own student government, policy, events organization and budget, and sometimes member payments. Besides that students guilds are official organizations inside universities. They have logos and own space inside university buildings. Students from relevant faculties gather there for different purposes like studying of having fun: lying on a coach, playing Xbox and drinking coffee or tea. Usually in each guild’s room there are free coffee and tea and everyone comes with own mug and stores it there.
This is the guild of mechanical engineering students. The entrance to the room is not easy to find since it’s hidden by a wall but a huge logo says that there might be something behind it. However the door looks like it’s going to be a technical room.
But it’s not a room with technical stuff and cables. Inside there is quite huge two-room space, and there is everything: from students books to bar and erotic journals. Of course there is no alcohol but tea and coffee. The design itself is absolutely different from what everyone would expect to be a university students room. Here students have freedom to choose how they would like to design their own space. And this is creative!
Once my mother and I were just exploring the university and found this place. We laughed when we saw that students have put women’s underwear on walls. We’ve been told that mechanical engineering students are mostly male, so to compensate the absence of female students they have hung their underwear on walls.
